A wide variety of media content may be delivered to and presented via a broad assortment of content presentation devices, such as desktop computers, laptop computers, tablet computers, personal digital assistants, smart phones, media streamers (e.g., Roku, Echo, etc.), smart TVs, and the like.
Moreover, recent developments in communication technologies enable media content streaming to be provided to a user on these devices when the user is in a specific location or when they are traveling. The content may be delivered by means of wired, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, private or public wireless internet protocol (IP) technologies, amongst others. For example, wireless data networks were developed primarily to provide voice communication services to mobile phones. However, wireless service providers also now use their wireless data networks to provide for the streaming of media content that can be received by and viewed on consumers' mobile devices. Such streaming media content may include, amongst other things, live or on-demand video segment selections of videos, movies, or television programming.
While communication speeds in wireless data networks continue to improve, there are still limitations for video streaming technologies and consumer charges for the amount of data consumed. For example, if a consumer is using a smart phone to access a video presentation service such as youtube.com, the user can be presented with a number of related videos that are streamed in a sequential manner. The videos are often related to each other, targeted to a user's preferences, past viewing history, or the like and generally assembled in a fixed playlist format. However, even though such services provide a certain level of user preference and customization, most often the play list is generic and static (i.e., the same videos in the same order for a significant amount of time), such that users end up skipping many videos and cycling through several videos before arriving at a video that they actually want to view in its entirety.
This type of presentation of content to users creates two significant technical issues. First, each video transmitted over a wireless network consumes bandwidth, and, therefore, the transmission of numerous videos that are often unwatched consumes a significant amount of bandwidth. Second, the content presentation device itself is still required to receive and store, at least temporarily in a data buffer, a portion or all of the unwanted video. As a result, the device's resources and processing requirements are continuously used for unnecessary actions. This behavior of the consumer being presented with content that the consumer does not really want also creates two significant consumer issues. Specifically, it increases the amount of data the consumer has downloaded often increasing their expense (and/or the data used goes against their data “caps”), and most importantly, it wastes the consumer's time. These technical issues and consumer issues often combine and reinforce each other such that users will choose not to utilize a given content presentation service because of all of the negative elements of the experience.